Nostalgia Trip With an Old Friend

Tuesday

Nov 29, 2011 at 10:03 PM

With The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, for the Wii, Nintendo has released an old-school game for old-school players.

SETH SCHIESEL

Among traditional gamers — those who were playing before the likes of Wii Sports, Guitar Hero, Angry Birds and World of Warcraft returned interactive entertainment to the masses — there is no more hallowed franchise than The Legend of Zelda from Nintendo. If you grew up playing consoles in the late 1980s and the ’90s, Zelda probably provided some of your touchstone gaming experiences.

Until Zelda came along in 1986, almost every console game was formed strictly in the quarters-devouring mode of the arcade. Of course you didn’t actually have to put a quarter into your Atari or ColecoVision every time you wanted to play, but the games themselves were transitory affairs meant to engage your reflexes, if not your mind or your heart. The goal was not to beat or complete those games, merely to set a new high score.

The only games with real narratives and characters, the ones with vast worlds to explore, puzzles to solve and treasures to uncover, were found on computers you played at a desk rather than on consoles you played on a couch. With Zelda, Nintendo demonstrated its genius by adapting the Tolkien-inspired sword-and-sorcery vernacular of foundational computer games like Ultima into a new art and design style that appealed not only to Japanese players but also to the young new audience flocking to its consoles in the West.

Twenty five years and more than 60 million copies sold later, all of the context, history and importance weigh heavily on the latest entry in the series, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, for the Wii. Some of the game’s individual elements, like its touching storytelling and meticulous environment design, reveal masterly execution. And some of its innovations, like the incorporation of the Wii’s motion-sensitive controls, are ambitious. Yet over all, Skyward Sword is so self-conscious, so formal, so ritualistic in its design and so antiquated in many ways that I came away thinking of it mostly as a nostalgia trip.

If you are already a Zelda fan (and there are plenty), Skyward Sword may very well become your favorite game of recent years. Within the context of the well-defined Zelda format — progress through forest, volcano and desert; wield blade, slingshot and bombs; rescue Zelda from the bad guy — Skyward Sword delivers the several dozen hours of entertainment that aficionados have come to expect. It is certainly the most substantial game for the Wii.

But if you are not already steeped in the series, and especially if you are accustomed to gaming on PCs or more advanced consoles like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, Skyward Sword is more likely to seem daunting, primitive and obscure.

This makes for an odd, perhaps not entirely unintended, situation. In the scheme of global entertainment and culture, the Wii has been the most important of the latest generation of consoles. Far more than the 360 or the PS3, the Wii has drawn women and families, many of whom had given up on living room gaming, back into the fold. And yet as the Wii’s swan song (Nintendo plans to introduce its successor next year), the company has released an old-school game for old-school players.

What does old school mean? When it comes to Skyward Sword, that most immediately means an ability to see past or tune out some obsolete graphics. I’ll admit that it feels a bit churlish to judge a Zelda game on its graphics, especially since this game has more refined visuals than earlier Zelda titles. But it simply must be pointed out that the Wii does not generate anything close to modern graphical fidelity. Diagonal lines tend to be jagged stair steps. Textures are blocky. The colors seem a bit washed out.

Nintendo has compensated a bit for the Wii’s anemic performance with a vaguely Impressionistic art style, but like Impressionist paintings, Skyward Sword doesn’t look so great close up. To make the low-resolution graphics stop annoying me every minute, I had to move about six feet farther away from my television than I normally sit to play intensive games on the 360 or the PS3.

Skyward Sword is also old school in that it does not mind making you go back to the same areas over and over again. It doesn’t mind making you fight the same enemy bosses multiple times. Or setting timed challenges that can make you repeat 10 minutes of tricky gameplay every time you fail. It doesn’t mind padding its overall playtime with perhaps 10 hours of meaningless go-fetch quests. Unlike some earlier Zelda games, Skyward Sword is actually quite linear. While there are some side quests, you are generally bound to one critical path through the game.

Skyward Sword is old school in less frustrating ways as well. The dungeons include polished environmental puzzles of the how-do-I-get-there variety. Every major area culminates in a traditional boss battle in which you must master the timing and patterns of the individual enemy or perish; when you eventually figure it out, the sense of accomplishment is undeniable. There is virtually no spoken dialogue, except for some emotive grunts and sighs. Instead every conversation requires reading rather than listening.

And reading the dialogue can actually be delightful. Japanese games are generally much more comfortable with being openly sentimental and emotional than Western games, and Skyward Sword’s rendering of the adolescent love between Zelda and Link (the player-controller protagonist) is genuinely heartfelt. Not mawkish, it is the strongest element of the game.

As for Skyward Sword’s motion-sensitive controls, I found them to be generally intuitive and well employed. The game implements one-to-one correlation between your movement of the Wii controller and your character’s sword on the screen. If you charge into combat waving the Wii wand willy-nilly, you’ll get wasted. Instead you must learn to observe your opponents and make precise strokes and thrusts when an opening appears. The system works, but when my wrists became sore, I wished that Nintendo had also included traditional button controls.

My concern is that the controls are perhaps the only major area where Skyward Sword departs from Zelda tradition.

It is a glorious tradition. I’m just not sure it represents a glorious future.